Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Paul Ryan Tries Keeping Up With Etch-a-Sketch Mitt By Pretending His Ayn Rand Fandom Is An 'Urban Legend'

Paul Ryan is trying out for the job of being Mitt Romney's running
mate by completely rewriting his own history. Which would make him a
nice match with Romney. Guess he's trying to prove that he can keep up
with the boss's Etch-a-Sketch approach to history.

We saw last week
that Ryan now wants to pretend that he never really was a big Ayn Rand
fanboy, since he figured out that Rand doesn't go down very well with
the Bible thumpers who comprise the GOP's most reliable base. But even
after he was called out as a liar, he's still trying to run away from
his Randbot past -- most recently in Jonathan Weisman's profile of Ryan for the New York Times:

Ryan likes to dispel two "urban legends" around him.
First, he said, he is not a disciple of Rand, the strident libertarian.
Second, he never drove the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

In fact, there is some truth to both. In a 2009 Facebook video, Ryan
said the "kind of thinking" in the Rand epics "The Fountainhead" and
"Atlas Shrugged" was "sorely needed right now."

As for the Wienermobile, one summer as he was pressing Oscar Mayer
Lunchables and turkey bacon on meat buyers in rural Minnesota, two "very
nice young ladies" who were driving the hot-dog-shaped vehicle did let
him "take it for a spin," he confessed.

This is classic NYT Beltway-style soft-pedaling: Ryan didn't merely
say a few nice things about Rand in that 2009 video, which you can watch
above. Here's the whole transcript:

RYAN: You know, it doesn't surprise me that sales of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged
have surged lately with the Obama administration coming in, because
it's that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed
right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living
right in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.

But more to the point is this: The issue that is under assault, the
attack on democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in
America, is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand,
more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of
capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what
matters most. It is not enough to say that President Obama's taxes are
too big, the health-care plan doesn't work for this or that policy
reason, it is the morality of what is occurring right now and how it
offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will,
to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack. And it is that
what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on, and we need that kind of
comment more and more than ever.

Contrast that with what he tried to claim last week:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an
atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts
and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to
paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas
Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of
knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and
large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn
Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author
of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

“I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.”

Of course, as Scott Keyes at ThinkProgress
observes, there are plenty of reasons why someone with Republican
presidential aspirations might want to rethink their love of Ayn Rand,
considering that she was a flaming atheist who despised Christians.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.